Joe Hawkings had seen violent rooms before.
He had walked through apartments where the walls still dripped.
He had stepped over bodies carved up by jealous lovers, desperate addicts, or people who simply woke up with too much rage simmering inside their skulls. He had cleaned his boots on curbs until the water beneath him ran pink.
Nothing, not one case in fifteen years, prepared him for Lucia Sutton's bedroom.
The hallway outside smelled like chemicals and fresh gloves. Inside the bedroom it smelled like a slaughterhouse that had been closed for summer. Heat, rot, copper. A thick metallic fog clung to the air as if the room itself was trying to warn him away. The detectives and forensic techs moved through it with the careful, mechanical rhythm of people who had forced themselves to push through nausea for a living.
Joe stood in the doorway at first, rooted so firmly to the spot that it felt like the floor had poured concrete around his shoes.
He tried to swallow. His throat clicked but did not open.
It looked as if someone had taken Lucia Sutton, chopped her into irregular, almost artfully varied chunks, and thrown them in deliberate arcs across the room. Not enough to form a picture, but enough to say a message had been left behind by something that thought about its work.
Her blood coated the ceiling in streaks that resembled an abstract mural. Her rib fragments glittered like wet ivory against the curve of her bedframe. Flesh was smeared into long strokes on the floor that led from the fallen chair near the table all the way to the edge of the bed, then from the bed into absolute chaos. But even chaos had a structure if you stared long enough.
Joe forced his lungs to expand.
The air tasted wrong. Old pennies mixed with humidity and something that reminded him of wet fur.
This was not human work.
Not even close.
He took a step inside. The floor stuck faintly under his shoe. A forensic tech in a white hood maneuvered past him carrying a sealed bucket filled with pieces he refused to identify. She muttered something polite and kept walking. Her boots squelched.
Joe steadied himself and pushed forward.
He tried to stop seeing Lucia as she had been last week when he had called her after reviewing her testimony. Powerful, polished, smug. Now she was a room. A smell. A cautionary tale written in organs.
He rubbed the lower half of his face. His hand shook.
He had tried to call her last night. A normal call. A chance to bring her a lead she might have actually wanted. She had hung up on him hours earlier, nothing strange about that. He had figured it was election stress or the exhaustion of losing. He had never imagined she would end the night as a collection of evidence bags.
Another tech dragged a portable light across the room. When it hit the far corner, the color deepened from red to black, like the blood had grown thicker there. Joe turned slowly, scanning.
The bed pulled his eye first. Its sheets were shredded. The mattress had been clawed open, revealing white stuffing that now looked pink. Something heavy had clearly been dragged along it. The fibers showed parallel grooves.
Lucia had not crawled toward the bed. No. She had been hauled.
He could see the heel marks, the brief scrapes where her shoes must have tried to anchor to the floor. She had fought, but only a little. More like shock than a struggle.
His gaze traced the line from the table. Two chairs had once sat across from each other. One was overturned, its legs twisted at odd angles. The other had been split open. Fabric torn, stuffing exposed, wooden frame broken as if something large had shoved straight through it.
Something eight feet tall, Joe thought.
He clenched his fists.
He knew a werewolf kill when he saw one.
But this was not the usual pattern. This was not blind frenzy.
This was intention.
He crouched by the fallen chair, ignoring the nausea creeping up his throat. The blood on this chair was thicker than the splatter on the walls. More gelatinous. Fresh but clotted, as if Lucia had been held here for a moment.
Interviewed. Questioned.
Watched.
Joe breathed out slowly. The smell curled in his sinuses.
He followed the drag marks to the bed again. From the bed, the room exploded. Claw marks in the plaster. Bite marks in the wardrobe. One deep groove in the wooden ceiling beam that could only have been made by someone strong enough to leap. Blood sprayed in three directions from a single point, indicating that the kill had paused, moved, resumed, turned. As if the killer was adjusting something mid-attack.
He frowned. His eyes narrowed.
This was choreography. A pattern disguised as madness.
Someone might look at this room and assume the monster had lost control. Joe knew better.
He continued to track the pattern. The arcs of blood curved toward the far wall. They fan-shaped around it, but none touched it. Not a single droplet. The floor at its base was spotless. There was only the wall itself, pristine, holding one message written in long, uneven streaks.
YOUR NEXT
The letters mirrored the inconsistency of a paintbrush dipped repeatedly in blood. Uneven width. The strokes long and trembling. No claw marks. No paw scrapes.
The killer had held something.
Something shaped like a hand.
A severed one.
Joe exhaled sharply through his nose.
His stomach flipped hard enough that he had to lean on a table for support.
He stared at the message. Its placement was not random. The untouched wall faced outward. If he remembered the layout correctly, that wall aligned with the city skyline all the way to Farren Towers and, more importantly, the direction of Moonstone Academy.
A threat.
A warning.
A signature.
The room's hum continued behind him. Cameras snapped. Gloves rustled. Evidence bags sealed. People whispered.
Joe barely heard any of it.
The killer had paused mid-kill. Not because of exhaustion. Because they wanted to make sure the message was delivered clearly. They wanted Joe specifically to see it. Or at least someone who could understand it the way he could.
A forensic tech bumped his shoulder lightly. Joe blinked as he surfaced from his train of thought.
It was her. The same woman with the round glasses from Lance's case. Today she wore a full protective suit, face shield lifted just high enough to reveal her tired eyes. She pushed her glasses down a little so she could look directly at him.
"Detective Hawkings," she said, her voice muffled but still clear, "you look like you are about to pass out. What do you make of all this?"
Joe swallowed. It was painful.
"I make," he said quietly, "that whoever did this did not lose control. This was planned."
She pulled a tablet from the crook of her arm and tapped it awake. Images filled the screen. Raw. Unfiltered. Before cleanup. A heavy chunk that might have once been part of a thigh. A curve of spine. The flattened smear of what used to be a hand. The severed arm that was missing its hand entirely.
He clenched his jaw.
She enlarged a photo of the pristine wall with fresh blood dripping down the letters. "Look at the pressure marks on the strokes. That is deliberate," she murmured. "Not a single smear from a finger pad or claw. Whatever wrote that, held something. Something about this feels personal."
Joe kept staring at the wall.
He nodded once, barely.
The tech's voice softened. "So what do you think did this, Joe?"
He already knew his answer.
He had known from the moment he walked in.
A werewolf kill should have been more direct. More efficient. A clean rip. A decapitation. A mauling that left bodies in recognizable shapes even if they were unrecognizable faces. A wolf acting instinctively still followed its instincts.
This was not instinct.
This was staged brutality.
Someone with intelligence and control had shaped it.
More importantly, someone had made sure the pattern pointed somewhere. Someone had positioned Lucia's pieces so that everything, every smear, every arc, every splash, all led the eye toward that untouched wall.
Toward the message.
Toward whatever came next.
Joe tightened his grip on the tablet until his knuckles went white. His heart pounded so loudly he thought the whole room would turn to look at him.
He had a theory.
He hoped he was wrong.
She waited for his response, brows raised.
Joe inhaled slowly, every breath tinged with iron.
"I think," he said, voice low and steady, "that we have a werewolf on our hands. But the arrangement of this room tells me something worse."
She tilted her head. "Worse than a werewolf?"
Joe looked at the message again.
"Someone who knows exactly what they are doing."
And despite the noise of the room, despite the cameras and compressors and voices, despite the techs bagging up what used to be Lucia Sutton, Joe felt a cold, precise dread settle over him.
His pulse began to thrum harder.
The Thornes. That thought flickered like a match in the dark. He remembered the bungalow murder. The little girl murdered in cold blood in the middle of the forest. Alone. In the dark. Scared.
He pushed that thought away. He had no evidence for that jump. None. And he was not here to guess wolves. He was here to understand a murder.
Sutton. Think of Sutton.
Joe closed his eyes for a moment, trying to picture Sutton's last hours. Slowly, something slid into place. Something he had been avoiding.
Sutton had been the one who Had Rallied the people and the police department to get the bungalow case the respect it deserved. Sutton had forced the situation that led to her poles to temporarily increase. It was this small but crucial nudge that Joe later used to narrow down the bungalow massacre to the Thorne family. All of that felt like a lifetime ago, but it had only been days. Days. And somehow the Thornes had found out that Sutton had contributed to the chain of events that put suspicion on them.
That would be enough motivation. Enough reason for retaliation. Enough cause to silence the man who had pointed the finger that eventually landed on them.
The more Hawkings looked around this room, the more it made sense. Sutton had been targeted because Sutton had been part of the reason Joe was getting close to the truth.
His breath grew uneven.
And the message was not for Sutton.
It was for him.
His eyes darted to that wall again, the untouched one. Clean. Stark. Facing the town like an arrow pointing home. He stepped closer and ran a gloved hand just above the surface. No dust. No streaks. No signs of contact. Whoever did this respected this wall. Or needed it pristine to make the point louder.
A sudden wave of cold rippled through him. The forensic tech next to him paused as if sensing his shift in energy.
But Joe was not looking at her. His eyes were on the doorway.
Through that frame, he saw Sheriff Nolan standing in the hall, phone pressed to his ear. Nolan looked calm, almost detached, voice low and pacing controlled. When Nolan noticed Joe's gaze, he flicked his eyes toward the room for a brief second before turning and walking away, murmuring something into the receiver as he moved down the hall.
Something inside Joe buckled.
A fleeting moment, a glance too quick yet too heavy, cracked open a vault of buried thoughts. Nolan had always been the obstacle. Every time Joe got close to something important in the bungalow case, Nolan blocked him. Every path that mattered had been shut down by that man under the guise of jurisdiction, procedure, or protecting the town's image. Joe had bargained with Lucia because Nolan had been the wall he could not climb or break.
But what if Nolan had not been an obstacle out of bureaucratic stubbornness. What if Nolan had been protecting someone. Or something.
Joe exhaled sharply.
The forensic tech beside him looked up.
"Detective, you alright" she asked quietly.
He had not realized he had spoken aloud until he caught the tail end of his own whisper.
"He knows."
The words had slipped out before he could reel them back in.
"What? who knows?" She asked a mix of curiosity and confusion.
He snapped out of his haze. He forced his features into a tired but controlled expression.
"Nothing," he answered, voice steadier now. "Just thinking out loud. Ignore me."
She searched his face for a moment, then nodded and returned to her notes. But Joe felt the weight of her suspicion settle in the space between them.
He stood straight and inhaled through his nose. The room smelled even heavier now. He hated how his lungs trembled.
If Nolan knew the Thornes were involved, then he had been hiding it from the beginning. If Nolan knew Sutton was in danger, he had let this happen. And if Nolan had known that Joe was narrowing in on the Thornes, then Nolan knew Joe was next.
His fingers tightened until the leather of his gloves creaked.
He looked once more at Sutton's remnants. Sutton had gotten caught in a storm that was not hers. She had been the first warning shot. Hawkings knew that. Or believed it. And belief was sometimes deadlier than truth.
He was not safe. Not in this town. Not with this killer. Not with Nolan watching.
For the first time in years, Joe Hawkings felt the cold press of mortality. It wrapped around him like an unwelcome coat, heavy, suffocating, full of questions he had no time to answer. His mind raced with every step he had taken in the investigation, every person he had leaned on, every betrayal he had missed. He felt the uncomfortable sting of misplaced trust. He had always believed he could read people. He had always believed his instincts were sharp.
But now he wondered how long Nolan had been standing behind him with a hand on the dimmer switch of every truth he tried to illuminate.
Joe swallowed again. His throat felt raw.
The case was not just a case anymore. The stakes had shifted. The ground beneath him was no longer stable. Every assumption he had held cracked like thin ice under boots.
And yet, beneath all that fear, there was something else rising in him. Something that had kept him alive this long. Something cold and sharp.
Resolve.
He looked back at the crime scene. His voice stayed low, but the words felt carved in stone.
"I will get justice," he said, barely above a whisper.